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Obama Brings It Home

Maybe President Obama was saving the magic for a time when we really needed it.

We’ve been complaining for two years about the lack of music and passion in his big speeches. But if he’d moved the country when he was talking about health care or bailing out the auto industry, perhaps his words wouldn’t have been as powerful as they were when he was trying to lift the country up after the tragedy in Tucson.

“Our hearts are broken, and yet our hearts also have reason for fullness,” he said, in a call to action that finally moved the nation’s focus forward.

The days after the shootings had a depressing political rhythm. There was the call for civility, followed by the rapidly escalating rhetoric over whose fault the incivility was, which climbed ever upward until Wednesday when you had a congressman from Texas claiming that the F.B.I. was hiding information on the gunman’s political beliefs because the truth would embarrass the White House.

For me, Obama’s best moment came when he warned that “what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.” In his honor, I am not saying a word about Sarah Palin’s video.

But, politically, there’s a challenge about where we go from here. You can’t expect the Republican majority in Congress to give up on killing the health care reform law, although it might be a nice step if the leadership urged its members to stop saying that God wants to see repeal.

You will notice I just said have a debate. And the bill does not even control guns. It simply bans the sale of the special bullet clip that allowed the Tucson gunman to shoot 20 people without reloading.

Photo

Gail CollinsCredit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

McCarthy’s husband was killed and her son permanently injured when a gunman using a pistol with a similar — but less powerful — kind of clip opened fire on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993. “That’s why I came to Congress,” she said on Wednesday. But so far she has collected co-sponsors only from the same small band of members who always support this kind of legislation.

Members of Congress are so terrified of the political power of the National Rifle Association that the Democrats, when they were in power, declined even to give McCarthy’s bill a hearing. This is the chance for the Republicans to prove that they’re braver.

All John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has to do is say that in the wake of the Tucson tragedy he wants to demonstrate that Congress is open to a serious and mature discussion of ways that it might have been avoided, or mitigated.

That might include proposals to better identify people with potentially violent mental illnesses. And it certainly would also have to involve a conversation over a technology that can turn a pistol into the equivalent of a somewhat slow-moving machine gun.

McCarthy’s bill might not have saved Representative Gabrielle Giffords from being shot. But it has to be worth talking about whether it could have saved some of her constituents.

So far, most of the proposals from members of Congress for practical action to reduce gun violence have been directed at protecting themselves. Representative Peter King of New York introduced a bill to ban anyone from carrying a gun in the vicinity of a federal official. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois suggested reversing a recent cut in members’ office budgets and tacking on another 10 percent increase to pay for improved security. Representative Dan Burton of Indiana urged enclosing the House gallery in Plexiglas. And two members vowed to carry their pistols with them when they go about the people’s business back in their districts.

Following the president’s lead, I would argue that Congress has the capacity for higher purpose.

“I believe we can be better,” he said. “Those who died here — those who saved lives here — they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”

In that light, I believe members of Congress can have a hearing and a civilized debate on a bill that is modest and relevant but that is opposed by a hyperpowerful lobbying group that scares the daylight out of them.

Maybe they could do it just to prove it to themselves that they can.

Just a thought.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 13, 2011, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Brings It Home. Today's Paper|Subscribe